Greater Iran

Greater Iran, also called Greater Persia or the Iranosphere, is a term for the wide cultural sphere shaped by Iranian peoples and Iranian languages. It is centred on the Iranian plateau and reaches into the South Caucasus, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, extending east as far as the Tarim Basin. The lands counted in it either lived for long periods under Iranian empires and dynasties, absorbing their culture and language, or received considerable Iranian settlement. Encyclopaedia Iranica calls it the Iranian Cultural Continent. The idea is cultural and historical rather than a modern state, and it is tied to the loss of territory by Safavid and Qajar Iran between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the Caucasus and parts of what is now Afghanistan and Iraq.